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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

The combined power of NASA's Great Observatories  the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space
Telescope  have been combined to find a hidden population of
supermassive black holes in the universe. It took the penetrating view of
Spitzer to finally uncover the black holes and their surrounding galaxies.

All these space telescopes peered across 13 billion light-years of space
into a small region of dark sky (called the Great Observatories Origins
Deep Survey field, or the GOODS field for short) that contains many
thousands of galaxies.

Comparing visible light and X-ray views of this region, astronomers
pinpointed X-ray sources that are supermassive black holes in young
galaxies which largely existed when the universe was half its present age.
But the telltale X-ray glow from other sources didn't have any obvious host
galaxies until Spitzer uncovered them. In this view the X-ray data is
colored blue and the Spitzer images are colored red.

[Top and Bottom Left] - A Hubble Space Telescope deep view of two small
portions of the GOODS field uncovers some of the faintest galaxies ever
seen. But at the center of each image is the X-ray glow from heated material
falling into a million- or billion-solar mass black hole  as seen by
Chandra  which does not have any visible-light counterpart in either field.

[Top and Bottom Right] - The Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared view of the
same two regions of the GOODS field uncovers the glow of a powerful active
galactic nucleus in both views. The nucleus is either shrouded in dust, or
is at such a great distance that all of its light has been stretched into
infrared wavelengths by the universe's expansion.